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Thus his youth had been spent in rude and ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native parts. He had not had the time to fall in love. - Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter 6.

Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy. The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister and his sister's children had left him only a vague and far-off memory which had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort to find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten them. Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his youth, if he had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss. - Vol. 2, Book 4, Chapter 3.

I know it's different kind of Love(Eros in the first and Storage in the second case.), it really gives me the thought of how a man who did not know Love became the one gives it.

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Les Misérables: 10th Anniversary Concert (1998)

The valid thing he ever said.

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The thief had flung away the loaf, but his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.🥖

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“ Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf; Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.”

I searched up Claude Gaux, and what came up was the short story “Claude Gueux” by Hugo. So yes, he is likely citing himself, but he’s also stressing his role as a historian of sorts: he’s treating Claude Gueux as a real figure whose story he chanced upon in the same way he happened to find Valjean’s story. And in a way, he is a historian. The statistics he cites at the end of this paragraph confirm that, even if the people he’s writing about are fictional, their experiences are all too real. His book and his short story convey the emotional and psychological aspects of this experience - in other words, the human parts of it - that statistics exclude.

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Having serious thoughts on today’s chapter is going to be so hard because I’m distracted now that I’ve learned Valjean is from Brie. This adds so much to Jean-Valjean-as-cheesemaker in Pontarlier.

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What happened on a Sunday evening of 1795, aka. 'Valjean stole the Bread'. Volume 1, Book 2, Chapter 6.

Clips from <Il cuore di Cosette>.

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Enter Jean Valjean

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LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Jean Valjean, LM 1.2.6 (Les Miserables 1925)

In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work. The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!

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Jean Valjean

Les Mis Letters reading club explores one chapter of Les Misérables every day. Join us on Discord, Substack - or share your thoughts right here on tumblr - today's tag is #lm 1.2.6

Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.

Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned to read in his childhood. When he reached man’s estate, he became a tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a contraction of <i>voilà</i> Jean, “here’s Jean.”

Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole, however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean was a sister older than himself,—a widow with seven children, boys and girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a husband she lodged and fed her young brother.

The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old. The youngest, one.

Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the father’s place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had brought him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishly on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude and ill-paid toil. He had never known a “kind woman friend” in his native parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.

He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word. His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from his bowl while he was eating,—a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the heart of the cabbage,—to give to one of her children. As he went on eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane, a farmer’s wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habitually famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in their mother’s name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for the pint of milk behind their mother’s back, and the children were not punished.

In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work. The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!

One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world, he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler, smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and the hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, the smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferocious men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit. There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the galleys.

On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floréal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte, was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of galley-slaves was put in chains at Bicêtre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang. An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old, still recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end of the fourth line, in the north angle of the courtyard. He was seated on the ground like the others. He did not seem to comprehend his position, except that it was horrible. It is probable that he, also, was disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of everything, something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept, his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he only managed to say from time to time, “I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles.” Then still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times, as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights, and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done, whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing seven little children.

He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601. What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from the young tree which is sawed off at the root?

It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge, wandered away at random,—who even knows?—each in his own direction perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear in succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race. They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their village forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field forgot them; after a few years’ residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot them. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar. That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon, did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think, towards the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through what channels the news reached him. Some one who had known them in their own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a poor street near Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre. She had with her only one child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the other six? Perhaps she did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing office, No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged to be there at six o’clock in the morning—long before daylight in winter. In the same building with the printing office there was a school, and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven years old. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school only opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school to open, for an hour—one hour of a winter night in the open air! They would not allow the child to come into the printing office, because he was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in the morning, they beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement, overcome with drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down and doubled up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the portress, took pity on him; she took him into her den, where there was a pallet, a spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs, and the little one slumbered in a corner, pressing himself close to the cat that he might suffer less from cold. At seven o’clock the school opened, and he entered. That is what was told to Jean Valjean.

They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash, as though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of those things whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard nothing more forever. Nothing from them ever reached him again; he never beheld them; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this mournful history they will not be met with any more.

Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean’s turn to escape arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place. He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,—of a smoking roof, of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime, to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years. In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself of it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found him hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition of five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In the tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years. Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. In October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.

Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf; Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.

Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.

What had taken place in that soul?

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Today's Les Mis chapter describes Jean Valjean's sentencing and subsequent journey as a part of a chain gang to the galleys of Toulon. Published from 1782-1788, Louis-Sébastien Mercier's work, "Tableau de Paris" is a multi-volume book in which he paints a picture of all aspects of Paris and Parisian life. Here are some excerpts from his eye-witness account of a typical galley chain gang leaving Paris:

"The Chain of Galley-slaves.

It leaves twice a year, on May 25th and September 10th. The galley slaves are held at the Château de la Tournelle until their departure for Toulon, Brest, and Marseille."

"On the departure day they are placed in long carriages. The same chain connects and binds them all to the wagon.  Eight policemen lead 120 wrongdoers this way. They leave, imploring help from their fellow people, towards whom they were violent and unjust. They leave; and the conscience, that indestructible judge, cries to many that their torture is light, and that they escaped the death that they have merited."

Mercier then goes on to ruminate on his feelings seeing the men bound for the galleys:

"Oh! How I would like to be able to read to the depths of their soul which is the most criminal or the most innocent! I would like to know why, how, and to what degree they have shown contempt to virtue. Is there, in these individuals, as in others, an equal balance of virtue and vice? Human laws are so heavy handed! And then is the moral perfection of society possible, and to what point?"

Noticing an older man in particular, he wonders how he came to be there, with some distinct parallels to Jean Valjean:

"Is he a hardened criminal who has escaped the justice of men all his life? …  Is he a poor soul thrown into the abyss for a partridge, a pinch of tobacco, a few pounds of salt; for among us Christians, the law of taxation is the most sacred of all; and we know that a partridge or a rabbit is worth infinitely more than a man, even if he is the father of a large family! This is what tears my heart, but the wagon is going to take them away, and with them their justification and the mark of their trial."

He ends with his views on the death penalty and the morality of sentencing men to such a fate for these crimes:

"Maybe one day we will feel it less necessary to take away the life of a man who is only guilty of the crime of theft, and rather conserve a citizen than make of gold an idol to which we sacrifice human victims."

The volume of Tableau de Paris that contains these excerpts can be found on the Internet Archive.

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One thing I love about Jean Valjean’s pre-prison backstory chapter is how human/flawed he is: he’s not an all-loving saint, but a regular guy taking on the duty of caring for his family even when when he has a lot of resentment about the burden that’s been placed on him. He’s not special. He’s an average guy and average criminal. His name literally means “voila gens”/“here is the man;” he’s an ordinary John Doe.

This is something I’ve noticed adaptations tend to change: they often want Jean Valjean to be unique, better than the other criminals in a way that makes him an Exception, a special person who doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with other criminals, and they want his arrest to be the system making a mistake rather than the system working as designed. But the novel is very clear that there is nothing special about Jean Valjean’s story, that he is not exceptional, and that he is a representative of a very common story and a very average kind of person.

I go back and forth on the description of young Jean Valjean sometimes, because on one hand, I do think Hugo has some classist ideas about peasants— but on the other hand, I really do like the characterization of Jean Valjean caring for his family while also being a regular person who feels overburdened by them, as anyone would. He protects his sister’s children by spending money they can’t afford on milk they’ve stolen, but he does it grumblingly. He spends all of his time working the same job that killed his father in order to support his family; but the narration points out he has no time to do normal young person things like falling in love, and he seems to exist without really believing he has any kind of future. He’s not this Ideal of Fatherhood—- he’s just a regular ordinary guy doing what he can to support his family even when he resents the weight that’s placed on him.

And despite all of his suffering under that weight, he still takes it on— and he still breaks down sobbing over his family when he’s parted from them:

While the bolt of his iron collar was being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept, his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he only managed to say from time to time, “I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles.” Then still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times, as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights, and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done, whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing seven little children.

And his first escape attempt also happens shortly after he’s told the only news he ever hears of his family.

So again, I think this is also something I think a lot of adaptations miss: Pre-Prison Valjean is not a saintly hero who’s “mistaken” for an average criminal. He’s a very common type of person with a very common type of tragedy:

It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge, wandered away at random,—who even knows?—each in his own direction perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear in succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race.

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The characters in their own words:

-Valjean: Who am I? (With so many aliases, you would understandably get confused)

-Javert: I am the law and the law is not mocked.

-Fantine: Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

-Cosette: What’s the matter with you, Cosette? (I think we all asked ourselves that question at some point)

-Éponine: I love him, I love him, I love him... but only on my own.

-Marius: I’m doing everything all wrong (true)

-Enjolras: Let others rise to take our place until the earth is free.

-Grantaire: Some wine and say what’s going on.

-Gavroche: That inspector thinks he’s something, but it’s me who runs this town.

-Monsieur Thénardier: Master of the house, doling out the charm, ready with a handshake and an open palm...

-Madame Thénardier: Or I’ll forget to be nice...

-The Bishop: I have bought your soul for God.

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the family ever 😭😭❤️

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I always thought it was so funny how Victor Hugo gave Grandfather Gillenormand long, long monologues because old men just ramble on and on and on . . .

And then I wondered if Hugo realized that he’s an old man who rambles on and on and on when narrating that very story . . .

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Valjean saw Magloire putting the silverware away. Volume 1, Book 2, Chapter 5.